Roskilde Viking Ship Museum

Where it sits. The Viking Ship Museum stands on the harbour front at Vindeboder in Roskilde, on the southern arm of Roskilde Fjord in Zealand, about 30 kilometres west of Copenhagen and 25 minutes from the capital by train. It occupies two connected sites: the Viking Ship Hall, holding the original vessels, and Museumsø — Museum Island — an outdoor boatyard, harbour and workshop area next to it. The cathedral, itself a World Heritage site and the burial church of Danish monarchs, stands on the ridge a kilometre uphill, so most visitors arrive on foot down through the old town.

Five ships, deliberately sunk. Around 1070, at a period of dynastic conflict, five vessels were filled with stones and scuttled in the Peberrenden channel at Skuldelev, about 20 kilometres north, to block one of the approaches to Roskilde by narrowing the navigable water. They lay there until 1962, when a cofferdam was built around the site and the water pumped out, allowing the timbers to be excavated in the dry — a landmark operation in maritime archaeology, led by Olaf Olsen and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen. The ships are numbered to six because what was initially recorded as Skuldelev 4 turned out to be a second part of Skuldelev 2.

The five make up an unusually complete cross-section of Norse shipbuilding:

• Skuldelev 1, an ocean-going cargo knarr about 16 metres long, built of pine in western Norway around 1030 — the type used on the Atlantic runs to Iceland and Greenland.
• Skuldelev 2, a great longship of roughly 30 metres for a crew near seventy, built of oak around 1042 and, by dendrochronology, from timber grown near Dublin.
• Skuldelev 3, a small Danish oak coastal trader of about 14 metres and the best preserved of the group.
• Skuldelev 5, a small warship of some 17 metres built partly from reused timbers, a working vessel rather than a prestige one.
• Skuldelev 6, an 11-metre fishing and utility boat from western Norway.

The hall, and its problem. The Viking Ship Hall opened in 1969 to a design by Erik Christian Sørensen: raw concrete, with a full glass wall facing the fjord so the excavated ships are seen against the water they sank in. It is a recognised work of Danish modernism and has been listed since 1997. It also sits at the water's edge on a coast where storm surge and sea level are rising, and protecting the ships has become a live institutional problem; the museum has spent years planning and debating a replacement building capable of keeping the collection safe, and the future of the original hall is part of that argument.

Boats built the old way. Museumsø is what distinguishes this place from a display of timbers. Shipwrights work in the open air with axes, augers and moulds, building full-scale reconstructions of the excavated vessels using cleft rather than sawn oak, and the results are sailed rather than moored as ornaments. The largest is Havhingsten fra Glendalough, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, a 30-metre reconstruction of Skuldelev 2 launched in 2004. In 2007 it sailed from Roskilde to Dublin — around 1,200 nautical miles in about six weeks, retracing the route back to the waters where its original was built — and returned the following year. The voyage produced hard data on speed, seaworthiness, crew endurance and the limits of the type. Visitors can go out on the fjord in smaller reconstructions between May and September, hauling on the same kind of rig.

Roskilde 6, the longest of all. In 1997, during construction of the museum harbour itself, another wreck emerged: a warship of about 37 metres, dendro-dated to shortly after 1025, the longest Viking ship yet found. Its surviving timbers were conserved over years and mounted on a steel armature that traces the missing hull, and the vessel travelled to the British Museum for its Viking exhibition in 2014 before returning.

Real ships against screen ships. Norse fleets on television are typically a combination of shore-bound sets, a small number of purpose-built hulls and digital multiplication; the ships in Vikings were constructed for production in Ireland, where the series was filmed, and were designed to survive a shooting schedule rather than the North Sea. What Roskilde offers is the inverse. The originals in the hall are the physical evidence, and the boats in the harbour outside were built from that evidence and then taken to sea, which is why they sit lower, carry less freeboard and look far less theatrical than most audiences expect.

Getting there. Trains from Copenhagen Central reach Roskilde in about 25 minutes, and the museum is a downhill walk of roughly 15 minutes from the station past the cathedral. Parking is available at Museumsø. Allow two hours for the halls and rather longer in summer, when the boatyard, the rope walk, the smithy and the sailing trips are all running.